ATLANTA—A dozen candidates fighting to be the next mayor of Atlanta crammed inside a union hall on a recent Thursday night. The moderator of the public forum, a black talk radio host named Rashad Richey, instructed the candidates to answer his questions by holding up a small sign that on one side said “yes” and on the other said “no.” He asked them whether they supported raising the minimum wage for city employees to $15 an hour and whether public money should subsidize billion-dollar stadiums. Then he turned to the topic of law enforcement: “Do you believe that police target or racially profile black and brown males in the community?”

In Atlanta, a city that boasts of being the birthplace of the civil rights movement, this is not a question that politicians are generally unprepared to answer. Indeed, nearly all of the candidates quickly raised their “yes” signs. One of them, a white city councilwoman named Mary Norwood, didn't. With her sign resting on her lap, the petite 65-year-old politician, a resident of the affluent, predominantly white neighborhood of Buckhead, sought clarification: “Atlanta or the country?” Annoyed that she had disrupted the format, Richey fired back: “Let me just ask you: Do you think people in Atlanta racially profile?” An awkward silence filled the room until Norwood started explaining, not entirely clearly, that, “it’s not a Pandora’s box. It’s really important …” As people in the audience hollered from their seats, Richey cut her off and moved on to the next question.

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So perhaps it should come as a surprise that a woman who has struggled to speak decisively on one of the most prominent and divisive subjects confronting her city is actually leading the race—by a lot.And if she wins on November 7,Norwood, whoholds a double-digit lead in the polls, would be the first white mayor of Atlanta in more than four decades. It turns out that the explanation for Norwood’s electoral advantage has less to do with her platform than the changing face of one of the most dynamic and important cities in the American South.

In 1973—the year of the first election after Atlanta became a majority-black city—the white Jewish mayor, Sam Massell, scare-mongered his way through a reelection campaign in which he infamously proclaimed on billboards that “Atlanta’s Too Young To Die.” He lost by more than 23,000 votes. The man who beat Massell, a charismatic lawyer named Maynard Jackson, ushered in an era of black leadership that grew over time into a well-oiled political machine. Sensing the city had become more receptive to them, some black Southerners who had flocked north during the Great Migration after World War II returned to a city that had not only become the cradle of the civil rights movement, but also offered enough educational, economic and artistic opportunities to become known as a “Black Mecca.” The construction of the world’s busiest airport, built with one of the nation’s first affirmative action programs to promote inclusivity, eventually drew major corporations to the region. The city won its long-shot bid to host the 1996 Olympics in part by conveying an image of racial harmony. But with the growth and success, led by a string of five black mayors, came gentrification and a subsequent decline in the black population.

Almost as quickly as it had climbed, the percentage of black residents in the city began to drop. Atlanta’s black population, 67 percent in 1990, fell to 54 percent in 2010. Some political observers expect it to have fallen below half now. Norwood, who flirted with victory in the mayor’s race of 2009, ultimately losing in a runoff to a black state senator named Kasim Reed, now hopes her name recognition will overcome a term-limited Reed’s opposition and a crowded field that includes lawyers, activists, politicians and an engineer. But the three leading white candidates—Norwood, businessman Peter Aman and former City Council President Cathy Woolard—are also banking that the demographics of the city—where poor residents were displaced due to the demolition of public housing, middle-class black families moved to the suburbs and young white millennials flocked to town—have tilted, once again, in their favor.

Majority-black cities like Detroit have recently elected white mayors. Conversely, in Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, a black mayor, has garnered two-thirds support during her first mayoral term in a district that’s no longer majority-black. But none of those cities are built on black identity—from W.E.B. Du Bois to Martin Luther King Jr., OutKast to Tyler Perry—quite like Atlanta.

Every candidate is running on a platform of inclusivity—vowing to be a “mayor of all Atlantans” or “everybody’s mayor”—but few outwardly discuss race in debates, or, if they do, it’s briefly mentioned in the context of broader issues like gentrification or affordability. Tiptoeing around conversations about race doesn’t change the fact that Atlanta’s mayor has always looked like its largest racial voting bloc. Now, at a moment of heightened racial sensitivity around the country, the election of a white mayor could signal a further step toward racial harmony where candidates are chosen based on style and substance instead of identity—or create division in a community that has long questioned whether the white power structure truly has its interests at heart.

“Historically marginalized people—black people—have often had to rely on the federal government for policies for equal protection,” said Atlanta historian Maurice Hobson, author of the forthcoming book The Legend of the Black Mecca. “As of 2017, we’re going to have to rely on state and local rights to protect us. … The nation is looking to Atlanta to see what they’re going to do.”

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In 1952, two years beforeBrown v. Board of Education kick-started the civil rights movement, Mayor William B. Hartsfield reshaped the city in his own image.

The white mayor whose smoothly brokered détente between the city’s business community and civil rights leaders would give Atlanta the image of the “city too busy to hate” realized that continued white flight eventually would result in Georgia’s capital city becoming majority black. Hartsfield, to avoid losing political clout to blacks, wooed predominantly white communities outside Atlanta’s borders to support being annexed into the city.

“This is not intended to stir race prejudice because all of us want to deal fairly with them,” Hartsfield wrote in a 1943 letter to residents of the then-unincorporated neighborhood of Buckhead, the community where Norwood and Aman now live. “But do you want to hand them political control of Atlanta, either as a majority or a powerful minority vote?”

Hartsfield’s gambit, which boosted Atlanta’s population by more than 100,000 people, continued the century-long string of white mayors for three more decades, until Maynard Jackson overcame Massell’s divisive campaign to win the 1973 election. A great-grandson of slaves, Jackson rewrote the rules of City Hall so “previously excluded groups could join in the feast,” political scholar Clarence Stone once wrote. He established affirmative action programs to hire minority employees, as well as contractors in building projects like the airport. The percentage of city contracts that went to minority-owned firms, at less than 1 percent in 1974, soared to 39 percent within just five years. “This is the best place [for blacks] in the United States if you’re middle-class and have a college degree,” Julian Bond, the civil rights trailblazer and former state representative, once said. “But if you’re poor, it’s just like Birmingham, Jackson or any other place.”

Several of today’s black mayoral candidates credit Jackson with making their political dreams seem attainable. Kwanza Hall, a councilman, admired Jackson’s ability to unite people as mayor. As a child, Hall sat on the lap of the mayor, who was dressed as Santa for a charity event. And Ceasar Mitchell, the 44-year-old current city council president and mayoral candidate, can’t remember a time in his life without a black mayor. In the late ’70s, when Mitchell was 9, Mayor Jackson spoke at the funeral of Mitchell’s father, one of the first black officers to integrate Atlanta’s police force, which showed him that a mayor’s personality could set the tone for his city. “I saw somebody that looked like me,” Mitchell said. “It gave me all the confidence to do what he had done.”

The progress made through black politics—marked by Atlanta’s overall increase in household income and a decline in poverty during the 1990s—was followed by backlash. Some of Jackson’s successors exacerbated inequalities among communities of color, got caught in corruption scandals of their own making or led the city into financial deficits. In 2009, as the black population continued to decline, Norwood’s first mayoral campaign surprised many in a city where whites had long lacked political clout. Running on a platform that was critical of Atlanta’s black-led government, she polled consistently in first place, at times close to 50 percent, suggesting she might have enough votes to avoid a runoff. Barack Obama’s election in 2008 had prompted idealistic talk of the advent of an era of “post-racial” politics, but in Atlanta, political power had consolidated in the black community, and many people were loath to give it up. With less than three months to go in the race, a memo written by two scholars at Clark Atlanta University circulated. The memo, which called for voters to consolidate support around a single black candidate to advance a “black agenda,” leaked—thrusting a local race into the national news.

“They feared that if the mayoralty goes [white], we should expect to see municipal workforce change, and the distribution of contracts change, and dispatching of services change,” said Michael Leo Owens, a political science professor at Emory University.

Kasim Reed, who then trailed another black candidate, City Council President Lisa Borders, refused to abandon his childhood dreams of becoming mayor. Reed, a mentee of former Mayor Andrew Young, rallied to get enough votes to defeat Borders and force a runoff against Norwood, which seemed much to his advantage, as registered black voters outnumbered whites by more than 30,000 in the general election. Reed won the runoff. But in a runoff that had more voters than the general election, blacks cast only 89 more ballots than white voters. A mere 714 votes kept Norwood from becoming mayor. The pendulum of racial power was clearly swinging.

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A self-described independent, Norwood is the closest this nonpartisan race comes to having a Republican. In 2013, four years after losing to Reed, Norwood, a communications consultant who once oversaw a company that owned R&B radio stations, was reelected to an at-large city council post. Back in office, she advocated for higher police pay and greater transparency amid an ongoing federal corruption investigation into city employees linked to the Reed administration. Her citywide position, combined with her willingness to attend even the smallest of civic functions, has generated strong name recognition. Her grass-roots popularity is perhaps fueled most by her reputation as a master of constituent services, the kind of council member who makes sure that a complaint about overgrown grass outside an abandoned property not only gets handled fast, but also with the touch of a seasoned salesperson.

“A lot of times the city thinks it’s communicating with citizens but it’s really not,” Norwood told POLITICO Magazine. “That’ll be a major part of how we re-establish trust in city government: Put all the city services online—and people know where the city workers are, and know they’re here today, and will be in your part of the city two weeks from now.”

Norwood says her responsiveness extends to just about every neighborhood, black or white, in the city. But her critics say these appearances around town rarely come with substantive policies to create lasting change. In one campaign appearance, Norwood promised to clamp down on “drug boys” dealing in black neighborhoods without specifying solutions to address the underlying social problems. “Appealing to us is more than showing up at black funerals,” is how the leader of the NAACP’s Atlanta chapter responded to her skipping its mayoral forum.

Peter Aman, a white consultant from Buckhead, says Norwood’s struggle to speak on issues of race reveals a disconnect that makes her “unfit to be mayor of Atlanta.” A political novice self-funding much of his campaign, Aman is running as an outsider who touts an insider’s knowledge of city government after serving as Mayor Reed’s first chief operating officer. To earn trust with black residents, he has tried to have candid conversations about race. He also opened his campaign headquarters in the historic black neighborhood of Sweet Auburn—near an iconic mural of Congressman John Lewis, a civil rights legend who marched with MLK.

“I refuse to ignore the fact that far too many Atlantans have already segregated the candidates based on race, and not record,” Aman said during one campaign stop. “I will not shrink from talking about it.”

“I chuckle when I hear candidates say that,” said Mitchell, who doesn’t believe he needs a translator on issues where race manifests itself, having grown up in predominantly black southwest Atlanta. “I’m not going to spark a conversation about race,” the council president said. “I’m going to say, ‘Let’s get to work.’”

Councilwoman Keisha Lance Bottoms, the only black woman running for mayor, believes her experiences transcending childhood poverty—her father was incarcerated for a drug conviction—allow her to connect with residents across class or race. A mother of four, she has described having the “life or death conversation” with her son about how to handle police encounters. In a recent radio ad, she called upon Atlantans to elect a mayor who can recognize that “racial profiling is a problem everywhere.”

“Mary can’t change something that she doesn’t even know exists,” Bottoms said in the ad.

A week after Norwood’s hesitation on answering the racial profiling question, mayoral candidates were asked during a forum held at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights to talk more about community policing. One black candidate spoke candidly about the formative experience of having an officer pull a gun on him at age 12; Norwood spoke about police wages but avoided the topic of racial profiling. In her interview with POLITICO Magazine, Norwood said “there’s no question” that racial profiling happens but that she had only been seeking clarification the week before so she could provide a nuanced answer to a complicated question.

“My support across the city has been strong,” she said. “I don’t break it out racially. I’ve had tremendous support from a diversity of citizens.”

So far, Norwood hasn’t been dinged in polls for skirting candid conversation about race: A recent Landmark poll placed her second among black residents. Harvey Newman, a retired Georgia State University political science professor, believes it shows that “she could be a uniting candidate.”

“I don’t know if mayors can really be the mayors of all communities,” Owens, the Emory professor, said. “They have to make choices among places and spaces. At the end of the day, there will be winners and there will be losers.”

Hobson, the Atlanta historian, said the city’s potential election of a white mayor could say more about the waning influence of the city’s black leadership. Unlike past elections, where influential “kingmakers” delivered thousands of votes to a single candidate, six leading black candidates are now sparring for splintered factions of the city’s black population.

Bottoms, who has polled in second place, believes that even though racial tensions have grown nationally, the issues affecting Atlanta remain the same as in 2009. “Those critical issues must be my focus,” she said. Norwood, for her part, professes hope that in a city as diverse as Atlanta, voters will judge her candidacy based on her track record of service rather than the color of her skin.

“I am who I am,” Norwood said. “When people know who you are, and they know how much you care, and they know what you’ve done for them, what you look like is actually superficial.”